“Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome.”

- Wikipedia

Most leaders we talk with feel pretty captive to their circumstances. As if there were something cosmic or predetermined about their situation that is beyond them and cannot be altered. I certainly know that feeling. There is a good chance you have felt it as well. Maybe it is the predominant operating system you are under right now.

It is interesting how fanciful a series of books like Choose Your Own Adventure feels. The idea that by making a simple series of choices could result in a completely different story sounds preposterous when you apply that concept to your own life.

But choosing a different path with a completely different outcome is absolutely available. The author Donald Miller proposes that we have a lot more to say about how our life goes than we realize. That we can settle for a more simple and less adventurous life that seems to be in ready supply in the world,

…or we can choose something a little more daring.

We just finished another Lifeplan retreat with a couple of dozen folks. Turns out that there is an incredibly strong link between the life we have and the circumstances and choices we have made. It also turns out that by partnering with God, you can make choices that allow you to co-author a much better story with the rest of your life.

Who wouldn’t choose to do that if it were possible?

Each of us knows deep down somewhere - likely covered in deep layers of disappointment, fear, and resignation - that there is a better life available. I know that there is one that was assigned to you before you came into the world and the evidence is strewn across your life like the debris in a stadium just after a big game.

Like the clues in an eternal treasure map, each data point not only triangulates the target more fully, but builds the incontrovertible fact of its’ reality. The fleeting belief that there may be more or better isn't the problem. The problem is that there isn’t enough courage or conviction for someone to act on the courage of that conviction.

Like nothing else I’ve ever experienced, Lifeplan not only excavates the hidden treasure that becomes a powerfully clear map, it makes the case so obvious that it is impossible to deny or not pursue. Pressfield thinks it has always been there and the great work of our lives is to merely discover it.

We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

— Steven Pressfield

Consider

Do you feel like life has dealt you the story you are living?

Do you ever have that feeling that there might be something more to life than what you are finding?

Do you know how much more fulfilling your life could be if you were to find the courage to go on this kind of journey?